ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE ARROGANT YEARS
“The poet-philosopher Jews of medieval Spain, the loyal and comfortable Jews of bourgeois Berlin, the dashingly cosmopolitan Jews of … Cairo? King Farouk’s Egypt as yet another lost and shattered Golden Age? In Lucette Lagnado’s startling account of her family’s trials, all the old Diaspora images and expectations are subverted and reversed: Jews thrive in the land of the pharaohs and languish in the workaday neighborhoods of New York. And yet finally New York does fulfill its promise, in the radiant presence of Lucette Lagnado herself—and in The Arrogant Years, her moving and unsparingly revelatory second memoir. Here we have honesty as purity of style, and lucidity as burning emotion, and history as an enduring hymn to resilience.”
—CYNTHIA OZICK
“Lagnado traces her mother’s heartbreaking trajectory from the pasha’s library in King Farouk’s Cairo to the confines of a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, where she tries to reconstruct her vanished home. If doing so proved impossible for the persevering Edith, Lagnado’s memoir—at once an elegy to a parent and to a country—comes close.”
—DALIA SOFAR
“You don’t have to be Jewish to take this entrancing literary ride. It begins peacefully in exotic Egypt, but political turmoil and savage anti-Semitism uproots the family to find refuge in America. Here the author, Lucette Lagnado—slim little kid, with a vivid imagination and adventurous spirit—confronts dull male orthodoxy and vapidity, which she overcomes with her own outrageous theology. The Arrogant Years is a lovely book, sad and hilarious by turn, written with love of life and an enormous affection for language. You will love it too.”
—MALACHY MCCOURT
PRAISE FOR THE MAN IN THE WHITE SHARKSKIN SUIT
“Beautifully written… A great personalized story of Egypt’s complicated history in the last half of the twentieth century.”
—FAREED ZAKARIA
“Stunning memoir… A deeply affecting portrait of her family and its journey from wartime Cairo to the New World. Like André Aciman in his now classic memoir, Out of Egypt, she conjures a vanished world with elegiac ardor and uncommon grace, and like Mr. Aciman she calculates the emotional costs of exile with an unsentimental but forgiving eye… Writing in crystalline yet melodious prose, Ms. Lagnado gives us an indelible gallery of family portraits.”
—MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times